Mahafaly Erotic

The Mahafaly live in one of the driest corners of Madagascar, the low plains running inland from the Mozambique Channel between the Onilahy and Menarandra rivers, with Betioky and Ampanihy as their market towns. This is spiny forest country: thorn scrub, octopus trees, baobabs, rain that comes late or not at all. Around 150,000 people identify as Mahafaly, and what marks them out to outsiders is not dress or speech so much as what they build. Their tombs are stone rectangles the size of a room, often more substantial than any house in the village, edged with the horns and skulls of the zebu killed at the funeral and planted with aloalo, carved wooden posts that stack tiers of geometric cutwork beneath a figure at the top: a bird, a rider, a zebu, a truck, a soccer player. The figure is not ornament. It says something about the person underneath.

They speak a dialect of Malagasy, which places them, like everyone else on the island, in the Austronesian family: the nearest relatives of their language are spoken in southern Borneo, an ocean away. Their own accounts and the wider evidence point to arrival from the southeast African coast around the twelfth century, and the population carries both currents. Wealth is counted in cattle, and zebu function less as livestock than as a running account with the dead, sacrificed at funerals, their horns fixed to the tomb, their numbers a public measure of what a family owed and paid. Ordinary life runs on fady, prohibitions that differ by clan and lineage and can attach to a food, a day, a direction, a word. Christian churches have gained ground, mostly in the towns, but obligation to the ancestors is the working religion. The name is usually read as those who make holy, which fits.

Politically the Mahafaly were organized into small kingdoms under ruling clans of the Maroserana line, the same dynastic stock as the Sakalava to the north, and they held out against French control into the early twentieth century. Today most farm cassava, maize and sweet potato on thin soil and herd cattle and goats through recurrent drought and the famine seasons the south calls kere. Ampanihy has a long sideline in mohair carpets woven from Angora goats. Younger Mahafaly move to Toliara and the capital for work and send money home, usually against a funeral.